Sylvia Mendez.
Credit: Richard Rivera, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers

People in the United States observe National Hispanic Heritage Month each year from September 15 to October 15. During this period, many Latin American countries celebrate their independence. These countries include Cuba, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, and Nicaragua.

Sylvia Mendez is an American civil rights activist of Mexican and Puerto Rican heritage. Mendez was 8 years old when her father became a plaintiff (person filing suit) in a lawsuit that challenged segregation (racial separation) in public schools. In Mendez v. Westminster, the plaintiffs challenged the legality of segregated schools for children of Latino descent in California. A ruling in favor of the plaintiffs was upheld in 1947, and soon after California outlawed explicitly segregated school systems. The case served as a basis for the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. In that case, the U.S. Supreme Court in 1954 declared racial segregation in public schools to be unconstitutional.

Sylvia Mendez was born on June 7, 1936, in Santa Ana, California. Mendez and her family moved to Westminster, California, in the mid-1940′s. There, they leased a farm from the Japanese American Munemitsu family, who had been forcibly moved to an internment camp (see Japanese American internment).

In 1943, Mendez’s aunt brought her own children, along with Sylvia and her brothers, to register for the 17th Street School, the school for the white students in the area. The school for Mexican children was run down and supplied with second-hand textbooks. The Mendez siblings were rejected from the 17th Street School. However, their cousins—who had fairer skin and lacked a common Latino surname—were allowed to register. Mendez’s aunt instead removed all the children from the school. Gonzalo Mendez, the father of the Mendez siblings, had attended the school as a child. He appealed to the principal, superintendent, and school board to allow his children and others of Latino descent to attend the school, but they denied his requests.

In the Mexican school, Sylvia Mendez recalls that the students were not taught to read or write. Instead, the girls were taught to knit and sew, and the boys were taught to do labor. Mendez’s mother, Felicitas, took over management of the farm while Gonzalo hired and worked with the civil rights attorney David Marcus. Along with several families in other Orange County school districts, they built a case, Mendez v. Westminster, representing about 5,000 Mexican American children denied equal access to education. Sylvia Mendez sat in court every day of the trial watching her father. The judge ruled in favor of the plaintiffs on Feb. 18, 1946. The ruling was upheld by the appellate court (court of appeals) on April 14, 1947.

Sylvia Mendez went on to earn an associate’s degree in nursing from Orange Coast Community College. She graduated from California State University at Los Angeles with a bachelor’s degree in nursing in 1976. Mendez worked as a pediatric (children’s) nurse for 33 years. After her retirement, she traveled across America to talk about her family’s efforts in favor of desegregation and education equality. In 2001, a new school in Santa Ana was named for Mendez’s parents. Mendez received the Presidential Medal of Freedom—the highest civilian honor awarded by the president—in 2011. Books based on Mendez’s story include Sylvia and Aki (2011) by Winifred Conkling and Separate is Never Equal (2014) by Duncan Tonatiuh. In 2018, a school in Berkeley, California, was renamed the Sylvia Mendez Elementary School.

February is Black History Month, an annual observance of the achievements and culture of Black Americans. This month, Behind the Headlines will feature Black pioneers in a variety of areas.

Barbara Rose Johns
Credit: Library of Virginia

Can you imagine inspiring all the students in your school? Maybe you already have. You might have inspired them to establish a recycling program. You might have urged students to talk with teachers and administrators about having a more diverse curriculum.

In 1951, at the age of 16, the Black civil rights activist Barbara Johns (1935-1991) inspired all the students in her school. She led a walkout of her segregated high school in protest of poor and unequal school conditions. Segregation is the separation of people by race. Johns’s walkout helped launch the desegregation movement in the United States.

Barbara Rose Johns was born on March 6, 1935, in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City. During World War II (1939-1945), Johns moved to Prince Edward County, Virginia, to live with her grandmother. Johns attended the segregated Robert Russa Moton High School in Farmville, Virginia. The school’s facilities were inadequate to handle its students. Although the school was constructed to hold about 200 students, more than 400 students attended. Classes were held in school buses and in the auditorium. When parents asked the school board for additional space, several tar-paper shacks were built.

In the 11th grade, after years of frustration, Johns began mobilizing students to protest the poor and unequal school conditions. On April 23, 1951, the students—led by Johns—left the school and did not return for two weeks. The protest attracted the attention of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Lawyers from the organization agreed to help the students, as long as the students agreed to sue for an integrated (combined) school, rather than simply improved conditions at the all-Black school. The students agreed, and the suit became known as Dorothy E. Davis et al v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, Virginia. It became one of several cases consolidated into the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. In that case, in 1954, the Supreme Court of the United States declared racial segregation in public schools to be unconstitutional.

After organizing the walkout, Johns began receiving death threats. So, she moved to Montgomery, Alabama, to live with relatives and finish school. Johns married William Powell in 1954. She became known as Barbara Johns Powell. The couple raised five children. Johns attended Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia, before earning a master’s degree in library science from Drexel University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1979. She became a librarian in the Philadelphia public school system. Johns died of bone cancer on Sept. 25, 1991.

In 2020, it was announced that a statue of Barbara Johns would be placed in Statuary Hall in the United States Capitol, representing the state of Virginia. It was to replace a statue of the Confederate General Robert E. Lee, which was removed for its association with racism and the legacy of slavery.

Six-year-old Ruby Bridges is escorted by United States deputy marshals at William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans, Louisiana, in November 1960. The first-grader was the only Black child enrolled in the school, where parents of white students boycotted the court-ordered integration law.
Credit: AP/Wide World

Ruby Bridges (1954-…) is another important figure in the history of integrated schools. She became one of the first Black children to integrate an elementary school in the Deep South region of the United States. In 1960, as a 6-year-old first-grader, she was the only Black student to enter the all-white William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans. On Nov. 14, 1960, federal marshals escorted Bridges on her first day of school. The child was met by angry mobs. Parents of white students boycotted the court-ordered integration and took their children out of the school.

Bridges was taught by a white teacher named Barbara Henry, and she was the only student in her class for the entire school year. By the time Bridges entered second grade, Frantz Elementary had been successfully integrated. There were no more protests, and Bridges was able to attend the school unescorted.

February 3, 2020

Today, February 3, marks 100 years since the 1920 formation of the Negro National League (NNL), the first of the official professional baseball Negro leagues. The Negro leagues were for black players, who were barred from playing alongside white players because of racial segregation. The Negro leagues operated until 1962.

The 1919 Chicago American Giants pose for the official team photo. In 1920, the manager Rube Foster (top row without uniform) led the team to the inaugural Negro National League title. Credit: Public Domain

An all-black professional baseball team existed as early as 1885. For many years, black teams played one another as independent teams. They also played all-white teams in exhibition games. Rube Foster, a former pitcher and the owner and manager of a black team, the Chicago American Giants, met with seven other team owners in Kansas City to form the Negro National League in 1920. The first season, the league included Foster’s American Giants and a second Chicago team known simply as the Giants as well as the Cincinnati Cuban Stars, Dayton Marcos, Detroit Stars, Indianapolis ABC’s, Kansas City Monarchs, and—somewhat confusingly—another Giants ball club in St. Louis. The teams did not play the same amount of games, and opponents often included independent black ball clubs in other cities, but the Chicago American Giants won the first title with a 43-17-2 record against NNL opponents.

Jackie Robinson, shown here sliding into home plate, was the first African American player in modern Major League Baseball. Robinson played for the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro American League before joining the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. Credit: UPI/Corbis-Bettmann

The NNL operated successfully until 1931. After that, the two dominant leagues were a new Negro National League (1933-1948) and the Negro American League (1937-1962). The best players were featured in an annual all-star exhibition called the East-West Game, and from 1942 to 1948, the league champions met in the Negro World Series.

Satchel Paige pitched 18 seasons in the Negro leagues before entering Major League Baseball in 1948 at age 42. Credit: AP/Wide World

In 1947, Jackie Robinson became the first black player in modern Major League Baseball (MLB). After Robinson’s success with the Brooklyn Dodgers, MLB teams quickly signed star players from the Negro leagues, leading to the decline and eventual end of those leagues.

Larry Doby played for the Newark Eagles of the Negro National League before making his MLB debut with the Cleveland Indians on July 5, 1947. Credit: AP Photo

Baseball historians agree that many Negro league players would have succeeded in Major League Baseball. Such Negro league players as Roy Campanella, Larry Doby, and Satchel Paige later starred in MLB and were elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Other Hall of Famers who spent their entire careers in the Negro leagues included Cool Papa Bell, Oscar Charleston, Josh Gibson, and Buck Leonard.

December 1, 2015

Sixty years ago today, Rosa Parks decided she’d had enough. The African American seamstress, tired after a long day’s work, decided to break the law by refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. A city law at the time required blacks to leave their seats in the next rows when all seats in the front rows were taken and other whites still wanted seats. Parks was arrested, triggering a boycott of the Montgomery bus system that lasted over a year. Her action helped bring about the civil rights movement in the United States.

Rosa Parks sits toward the front of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, soon after the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that segregation on city buses was unconstitutional. Credit: © Underwood Archives/Getty Images

Rosa Louise McCauley was born on Feb. 4, 1913, in Tuskegee, Alabama. She attended Alabama State Teachers College. In 1932, she married Raymond Parks, a barber. She held a variety of jobs and, in 1943, became one of the first women to join the Montgomery Chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). She served as the organization’s secretary from 1943 to 1956.

Parks lost her job as a seamstress as a result of the Montgomery boycott. She moved to Detroit in 1957. From 1967 to 1988, she worked on the Detroit staff of John Conyers, Jr., a Democratic member of the U.S. House of Representatives. In 1979, she won the Spingarn Medal for her work in civil rights. In 1996, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 1999, she was awarded a Congressional Gold Medal. Parks died on Oct. 24, 2005. A statue of Parks was dedicated at Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol in 2013.

Additional World Book articles:

• Colvin, Claudette
• Desmond, Viola
• Emmett Till case
• Million Man March
• Detroit (1994) - A Back in Time article

April 11, 2014

At a summit celebrating the 50th anniversary of the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964, United States President Barack Obama praised President Lyndon Baines Johnson for “opening new doors of opportunity and education” for him and millions of other Americans. Johnson “knew that he had a unique capacity as the most powerful white politician from the South to not merely challenge the convention that had crushed the dreams of so many but to ultimately dismantle for good the structures of legal segregation,” President Obama said. The summit was held in Austin, Texas, at the LBJ Presidential Library and Museum. Johnson, who served as president from 1963 to 1969, signed the landmark measure on July 2, 1964, the day it was finally passed by Congress. The law was a major accomplishment of the civil rights movement, the main domestic issue in the United States in the 1950′s and 1960′s. Other speakers at the summit included former Presidents Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush.

Lyndon Baines Johnson (AP/Wide World)

One of the nation’s strongest civil rights laws, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed to address the widespread political, economic, and educational oppression of African Americans and other minority groups. Beginning in the late 1800′s, blacks in the South increasingly suffered from segregation, the loss of voting rights, and other forms of discrimination. These practices were designed to keep the vast majority of African Americans in the South in a form of slavery known as peonage. This was especially true of blacks who worked as sharecroppers. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 transformed American society by banning discrimination because of a person’s color, race, national origin, religion, or sex. It opened to all Americans hotels, motels, restaurants, and other businesses that serve the public. At that time, many businesses, especially in the South, refused to serve blacks.

The 1964 Civil Rights Act also outlawed discrimination against minority voters, which included numerous state and local laws as well as violent intimidation, and guaranteed equal job opportunities for all. Johnson, a former U.S. senator skilled in dealing with legislators, pushed the law through Congress, overcoming fierce opposition by some members.

Additional World Book articles:

• Jim Crow
• Martin Luther King, Jr.
• Voting Rights Act of 1965
• Civil rights (1964) (a Back in Time article)